The Path (2)
Would water not flow along the Abyss's path?
Harad had actually gone so far as to wonder that.
A flight of fancy, that had been.
Serzilla's search routes were unmistakable. Paths had worn themselves into being there precisely because they were traveled so often. Call the Boundary unfathomable — traces, given time enough to pile upon traces, could not help but remain. The Outlands proved no different. However alien its people, they too, in the end, had to walk the ground beneath their feet.
Not that it showed much.
Their footsteps were careful, though. The paths branching off like tree limbs might account for some of it, but the likelier reason was their wariness of one another — of rival Towers. A path was a Tower's property, the fruit of its inquiry into the Boundary, at once research and record of achievement. Magicians who shared that harvest were rare. If they withheld it even from their own comrades, what of outsiders?
Harad, in effect, had picked up one such fruit and made a meal of it — not that he'd had the leisure to examine it closely. If anything, contact might only grow more frequent. It was a Tower's route, after all; the odds of crossing a magician would only have climbed. He could only hope the path had been shut.
The sky was dark as a starless night. Against that black backdrop, a single thread of smoke had been drawn — smoke from the watchtower. The path Harad walked did not run beneath it, but it bent the same way. Reason enough to press on.
Then, all at once, blood came embroidered across the black sky. He tipped his gaze down a hair and found it fountaining upward. The fountain was a magical beast — or precisely speaking, a beast that was body alone, its head away in the distance, bouncing and rolling. Ellen, who had cut it down, was walking back with her sword given a careless flick.
"So it really is safe, then."
A Tower's path was not a safe path. It was a comparatively safe one — and Ellen was learning firsthand just how wide a gulf that comparatively opened.
"I suppose there's a reason it's called a path at all."
The Second Wall lay at the very heart of the Boundary. Yet for all that they were bound for such a place, the beasts they had met so far were, at the very worst, 4th Circle, and their number had only just crept past ten. It was of a piece with why the beasts dwelling along Serzilla's search routes were comparatively sparse: the magicians who used this path must have culled the local ones at regular intervals. And they would have given a wide berth to any zone where high-Circle beasts made their dens.
Perhaps that was why the path wound this way and that — clearly there were grounds its makers had shunned. The path curved south. Look north, and something like light was falling in sheets, each strand of it a thunderbolt, and within, an enormous black shadow undulated. A magical beast, surely. Even that was information. Harad planted it into the map in his head — a map of the Boundary, blank space dominating it utterly.
"If we meet a magician, we kill them on the spot."
At the remark out of nowhere, Ellen's eyes went round.
"What's brought this on?"
"When you've gained something, you have to be ready to give something up, too."
Harad made a point of speaking to every Outlands magician he encountered — to sow confusion through the Outlands while wringing out whatever scraps of intelligence he could besides.
"Because you don't know whose path this is?"
He would need to know which Tower owned it to pass himself off as that Tower's magician. Of course, the odds favored this being the Abyss's path. But there was always the chance he was wrong, and it was better to settle the matter before venturing any deeper into the Boundary.
"That too — but this is hardly the place for conversation."
They were bound for the depths of the Boundary. They could barely spare the attention to watch for beasts; idle chatter with a magician was out of the question.
"Kubel!"
Ellen's shout meant one thing: danger.
Kubel threw himself aside in an instant. A palm the size of his whole frame came crashing down where he had stood, pulping the ground — some glutinous parody of viscera — and spraying wreckage in every direction. Through that soft, clinging debris a curve was carved, savage and clean: Ellen's sword, splitting the beast's arm and skull lengthwise. The cross-section held no bone. This was a creature of nothing but flesh and entrails clinging together, and there were seven of them. Even mid-tumble, Kubel never lost the cigarette clamped between his teeth.
"Kubel."
Harad called — it meant: light up. From where he lay, Kubel dragged in a breath with all his strength and blew it out, and the smoke crossed to the beast at point-blank range. Before long it caught, and the flames swallowed the creature whole.
The beast did not melt — it burst. Flesh and fire flew in every direction like volcanic bombs, and the instant the flames touched the other beasts, they spread wide. The creatures shrieked, thick and sticky. This time there was no eruption. While they writhed in the fire, Ellen opened their throats one by one.
"...Let's hurry on."
So said Ellen, every last beast put down — and she looked worn. Not because more identical beasts were closing in from the distance, nor because the beasts troubled her. They were 3rd Circle: stronger than Kubel, perhaps, but nothing like a challenge for her. It was the toll on the mind.
The sight of creatures composed purely of flesh was horrific. Lumpy meat hung with what looked like organs, swinging loose with every movement — the view alone brought bile up the throat. The smell was worse still. Even the ground was like gut: soft and sticky, and warm, which was the worst of it. The trees scattered here and there bore entrails where fruit should have hung.
"...Eat any of it and I will kill you."
Ellen laid down the law to Harad, who was all but drooling. She hated this land — and no less, the sight of him absorbing the hearts it had grown.
Harad hauled Kubel to his feet and fell meekly in behind Ellen. Her stride was enormous, her footprints marching farther and farther ahead with every step; Kubel had to run flat-out just to keep pace. Thanks to that, the end came quickly into view. The visceral ground gave way to ice underfoot — blue, like gazing upon a glacier. Wham, wham! Ellen stamped fiercely at the ice, scouring the soles of her feet.
Harad set the ice aflame, melting out three pools of water, each the size of a bathtub.
"May we get in?"
"I doubt things get any worse than this."
All three of them were a sorry sight, caked in flesh and blood. Ellen stepped straight into a pool, rolled a few times, and stepped out. Soaked through, she looked at him, and he gave his fingers the smallest snap — the flame that leapt up drank the water from her body. The precision of that control was uncanny. Dry again, Ellen smiled her satisfaction. Then, belatedly, she worried — it was as Harad dried himself, and Kubel after her.
"Shouldn't you be saving your mana?"
"I'm fine. I've absorbed quite a lot."
There was still room to spare. He hadn't managed to absorb the flesh-beasts, but the hearts taken before them were far from few. And — something else was coming.
"What do they look like to you?"
Harad asked Kubel, nodding at the oncoming pack.
"Demon goats, sir. Though far larger than any I heard tell of on the continent."
The continent had its magical beasts too — weaker than the North's, and the North's weaker still than the Boundary's. Living proof of what had happened long ago: the Outlands had once existed upon the continent, and the continent had driven them to the polar ends of the world.
"Look hard enough and you'd find specimens like those on the continent as well — mutation exists everywhere."
In the Boundary, though, such mutation was simply everyday life.
The demon goats Kubel knew ran twice the size of an ordinary goat. The things charging at them now were the size of a small stable.
"What do we do?"
"Same as ever. As fast as we can."
They could not linger in a fight. Call the path comparatively safe — it was the Boundary all the same. The Second Wall, spread across the south, looked far vaster than before; it meant they had come that much closer to the depths. Drag things out, and a high-Circle beast might well mark them. That vigilance was rooted very deep in Ellen. The rabbit was why: if even one beast of that kind so much as popped up, they would be wiped out to a soul. And still they advanced along the path — not solely for Harad's greed to chase the watchtower's smoke.
"I'll take them."
Ellen drew her sword on the demon goats. The corner of her mouth was curled. That beautiful, savage smile was another reason they pressed on.
The idol of Serzilla's knights — of those battle-mad fanatics. Ellen relished the thrill more than anyone alive; she took her pleasure on the line of death. Left to her own devices, the human called Elaine would have fought herself into the grave. It was her nature. Back then, when they met the rabbit, Elaine had been ambushed and knocked out of the fight — yet the instant she came to, she drew her sword and went looking for the rabbit first. Even having felt the overwhelming gulf between them, she had meant to fight it regardless.
"My personality is rotten to the core. I need someone to keep it in check."
The personality past-life Elaine had confessed to included this nature of hers. It was the reason Harad's temperament had been corrected. Elaine had wanted him to rein her in, in all manner of ways.
For now, the jet-black that flashed was faint. Her blade, steeped in the aura peculiar to Serzilla, churned through the demon goat pack, and Ellen, planted at the heart of the herd, ran wild.
"...Are you quite sure it's all right not to stop her?"
Kubel asked, looking green. To him, it seemed, she looked every inch a madwoman.
"It's fine. She's always been like that."
The regressed Harad felt no reason to hold her back. When she went too far, he need only take up the reins a little. What past-life Elaine had wanted was control, not correction — this life would be the same.
Blood ran across the ice like a river, the blood of the demon goat pack. At the center of the corpses stood Ellen, lacquered in red, smacking her lips.
"Any more?"
"No."
A low flame darted toward her — and braked hard right in front of Ellen. The melted ice sheet burst into spray and doused her, and her hair went cold.
"Dry the water off me too, please."
Ellen smiled sheepishly.
The demon goat carcasses, hacked to ribbons, were a shambles — and yet, amid it all, the hearts were whole. Even in her frenzy, Ellen had been mindful of him. Harad found the fact both amusing and gratifying. A consideration that, not long ago, could not have existed.
"You're thankful, aren't you?"
"I am."
Harad drew the heart from the largest carcass, and with his other hand brought out the orb he kept against his chest — the orb the rabbit had given him, the beast Cassion had named the Moon's divine beast. At the very first, this orb had been silver. Or precisely speaking, it had brimmed with silver mana. Now it was empty to the last drop. Cassion did not know how it came to be filled, and neither Harad's mana nor Cassion's could fill it.
Harad laid the orb on his left palm and, above it, wrung the heart slowly. Blood dripped down, soaking the orb. This was not the first time he had performed the task; on the road here, he had been through the ritual any number of times.
Not the beasts' mana, either.
As expected — nothing. The blood-slick orb refused to fill with silver light, and scrubbing the heart against it changed nothing either.
Had it been the rabbit's mana, then? Or the Moon?
Either way, he was stuck. He loathed the rabbit, and in his past life he had never once heard tell of a magician whose Origin was the Moon. The odds were, no such magician existed.
Tsk. Clicking his tongue, Harad set his mana to work. Flame gobbled the heart in a single lick and spread to the other carcasses, and the mana streaming along the fire made Harad's own heart a shade heavier.
He really had gone mad.
Glancing briefly into his inner space, Harad felt the corner of his mouth lift despite himself. He was still 3rd Circle — but measured against his past life, the pace of growth defied reason. The Sun of his present was several times the size of the Sun he'd carried at 3rd Circle before. At this point, if not quite Tyrell Aquins's measure, surely it rivaled the abundance of the Outlands' common nobility.
More mana did not simply mean more spells cast, or wider ones. It meant stability. A puddle totters at the smallest ripple; for a lake or a sea, no such thing exists. The more mana one held, the less one's own magic could shake one — if the spell itself were colossal, that was another matter, but still. And the fuller his mana ran, the fainter the aftereffects of Projection would grow.
And then, at last, the 4th Circle.
It was a shortcut only regression had made possible. Ordinary 3rd Circles, naturally — even the dim 4th Circles could not so much as dream of Projection.
By the time Harad's mouth ran dry, Ellen had taken the lead again. How far would they go? The question never came up. Apologies to Kubel, but Ellen had no wish to turn back; she was being seduced by the line of death called the Boundary. Harad saw no need to stop her. Whatever Tower's path this was, it had not yet been severed, and it still ran true to the watchtower's smoke. Decisively: the more lines of death Ellen weathered, the more steeply she would grow. Harad's role was to sort those lines — to know which could be survived. With every survivable line she crossed, Serzilla's jet-black would deepen.
A little farther wouldn't hurt.
So far, no moment had truly earned the name. The Second Wall had begun to make its grandeur felt, but in truth it remained far off. The Boundary's corrupted mana warped space itself; this land, narrow upon the map, might well feel wider than the whole North to anyone walking it.
The ice gave out. Crossing that clean-cut border, what met their feet was ground cracked dry and brittle, its pattern of fissures putting him in mind of tree bark — and when he peeled a scrap loose and chewed it, sure enough, close enough. Nor was the ground alone. This was a forest, a drab one: no grass, no leaves, nothing but trees. The countless trees resembled willows, save that from their twig-ends hung yet more branches instead of leaves, limp and drooping, in numbers as dense as hair.
As they drew near, a tree moved without warning. Branches swung like brooms, sweeping everything around them — every last tree was a magical beast. Ellen neither advanced nor drew her sword; she looked to Harad instead. The beasts were trees, and on affinity alone, no one suited the task better. Going around was no option at all: the path ran into the forest, and they would have to cut across between those tree-beasts.
Strange.
A comparatively safe path — that was the definition of a Tower's path. And yet they were meant to punch through a pack of magical beasts?
"What do you make of it?"
Harad asked Kubel. He wanted an interpretation untainted by prejudice. But Kubel never needed to open his mouth. From far off, the answer was already on its way.
"Magicians."
To Ellen's eyes, what they were was plain.